Defining Europe and “the West” more generally has become a difficult and contentious project, as political as it is theoretical and as pressing as it is unlikely to result in a broad consensus. Now that boundaries are being tested and former certainties are becoming obsolete in both theory and practice, to define anything at this level of abstraction, with so much at stake for so many, is to enter a debate where theory is immediately translated into politics (or vice versa). For example, one recent trend of thought looks to the Roman tradition as the basis of European identity, but given how it understands “Rome” this position inevitably reflects a Latin bias. Are the Slavic, Germanic, and Greek traditions and contributions – to name only a few – so marginal? In a more sophisticated version, the Roman basis is perceived as fundamentally engaged with the Greek and Hebrew pasts and so both defined by them and in a self-conscious, secondary relation to them. Yet this ignores the degree to which ancient Hellenism and Judaism were themselves also defined through constructed oppositions, and it also tends to conflate “Roman” with “Latin” and even “Catholic,” choices that, as we will see, are anything but ideologically neutral. Others insist that Christendom is the true crucible of the modern West. But this too imposes discomforting exclusions, and challenges the secular enterprise of modernity.